*'''Reference Gender Checker'''. Is your letter of recommendation too gendered. Are you using more communal adjectives (e.g. affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, sensitive, nurturing, agreeable, tactful, interpersonal, warm, caring) and not enough agnetic adjectives (e.g. assertive, confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken, intellectual) for letters for your female students or postdocs compared to the men? I'd like to develop a service which allows plain text upload of letters, strips them for these and other adjectives and gives an objective answer to this dilemma. Idea inspired by [http://www.academic.umn.edu/wfc/rec%20letter%20study%202009.pdf Madera, Hebl and Martin 2009] paper which suggests this type of language difference is typical, and damaging to careers of women in academia. [Karen]

*'''Reference Gender Checker'''. Is your letter of recommendation too gendered. Are you using more communal adjectives (e.g. affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, sensitive, nurturing, agreeable, tactful, interpersonal, warm, caring) and not enough agnetic adjectives (e.g. assertive, confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken, intellectual) for letters for your female students or postdocs compared to the men? I'd like to develop a service which allows plain text upload of letters, strips them for these and other adjectives and gives an objective answer to this dilemma. Idea inspired by [http://www.academic.umn.edu/wfc/rec%20letter%20study%202009.pdf Madera, Hebl and Martin 2009] paper which suggests this type of language difference is typical, and damaging to careers of women in academia. [Karen]

* '''Daily Astronomy Tip'''. Create a Twitter account which automatically tweets a daily astronomy tip, similar to e.g. the [https://twitter.com/SciPyTip @SciPyTip] and [https://twitter.com/climagic @climagic] accounts. The tips could be about astronomy computing in particular, or about astronomical techniques in general. Multiple people can aid this hack by creating a list of useful 140-character-long tips. [Geert]

* '''Daily Astronomy Tip'''. Create a Twitter account which automatically tweets a daily astronomy tip, similar to e.g. the [https://twitter.com/SciPyTip @SciPyTip] and [https://twitter.com/climagic @climagic] accounts. The tips could be about astronomy computing in particular, or about astronomical techniques in general. Multiple people can aid this hack by creating a list of useful 140-character-long tips. [Geert]

+

* '''How far back?'''. For a given astronomical distance provide a world event (scrape Wikipedia) that was occurring when the light we are now recieving set off. Useful for outreach e.g Cygnus X (MSF region) at 1.7kpc ~ 5500 light years so it set off in 3500BC when... "The Sahara desert starts to form from semi-arid savannah, through desertification." Clearly it'll be more fun the closer you get to home... [Adam]

== Interesting Data ==

== Interesting Data ==

Revision as of 11:11, 9 April 2014

Hack Project Ideas

Feel free to leave your name next to your idea (although there's no obligation!)

haikubot. Make a bot that tweets haikus found in arXiv papers posted that day. [Ruth]

Outreach Map. Create a map which indicates the nearest professional astronomy department for any place on the British Isles, count the number of people in each "catchment area", and compute the number of professional astronomers per citizen within it. [Geert]

(Love the idea of "Voronoi binning" the UK based on proximity to a professional astronomy group! [Karen])

Acknowledgement Parser. Parse the acknowledgements section of a large number of papers, identify the people and software that are most frequently mentioned, and give these credit on a web page. [Geert]

(Partly already available at ADS: in the search box use ack:"XXXX" to search the acknowledgment section [Karen])

Reference Gender Checker. Is your letter of recommendation too gendered. Are you using more communal adjectives (e.g. affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, sensitive, nurturing, agreeable, tactful, interpersonal, warm, caring) and not enough agnetic adjectives (e.g. assertive, confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken, intellectual) for letters for your female students or postdocs compared to the men? I'd like to develop a service which allows plain text upload of letters, strips them for these and other adjectives and gives an objective answer to this dilemma. Idea inspired by Madera, Hebl and Martin 2009 paper which suggests this type of language difference is typical, and damaging to careers of women in academia. [Karen]

Daily Astronomy Tip. Create a Twitter account which automatically tweets a daily astronomy tip, similar to e.g. the @SciPyTip and @climagic accounts. The tips could be about astronomy computing in particular, or about astronomical techniques in general. Multiple people can aid this hack by creating a list of useful 140-character-long tips. [Geert]

How far back?. For a given astronomical distance provide a world event (scrape Wikipedia) that was occurring when the light we are now recieving set off. Useful for outreach e.g Cygnus X (MSF region) at 1.7kpc ~ 5500 light years so it set off in 3500BC when... "The Sahara desert starts to form from semi-arid savannah, through desertification." Clearly it'll be more fun the closer you get to home... [Adam]